“One of those moments”: the 1974 song that made Jeff Lynne believe
Jeff Lynne didn’t ever want to settle for good enough when working with ELO.
All of his songs were about trying to expand his palette to some degree, and that wasn’t going to get done by just having a simple acoustic guitar and voice song every single time he made a new record. What he was doing needed to have a bit more finesse to it, but he understood when the band was spinning their wheels and when they hit upon something that made the hairs stand up on their arms.
But it’s not like Lynne got up one morning and decided he was going to be one of the best baroque pop producers of all time. He already had a firsthand experience seeing how The Beatles worked for a second in Abbey Road Studios, and while The Move wasn’t a band that was equipped for that kind of experimentation, you could definitely hear Lynne going in a bold new direction when working on ‘10538 Overture’.
This was the sound of classical music and rock and roll smashing into each other, but that was also part of the issue in the early days. A lot of those tracks were impressive for what they were, but there was still a focus on the classical side a little bit too much. They were certainly experimental for the time, but when you listen to Out of the Blue, for instance, it’s not like Lynne was going to be making the same kind of grand epic that he did with Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ whenever he started making his hits.
He was definitely moving in the right direction when he got John Lennon’s approval on ‘Showdown’, but there were still pieces that were clearly indebted to the classical world, with ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ closing out the same record. Lynne wasn’t afraid to wear those influences on his sleeve from time to time, but ‘Can’t Get It Out of My Head’ was the real turning point of his career.
It wasn’t clear that he knew what it was like to write an earnest pop song, but after showing his family that he had what it took, the rest of Eldorado played out like a fairy-tale-esque concept record. Lynne had cracked the code on what ELO was truly supposed to sound like, and when he brought up the strings for the first time on the overture, he felt like he had finally come up with something that no one else had.
He was making music that sounded unique like him, and even if The Beatles were still his clearest influence, he knew that people were going to be knocked back by what they heard from the minute they turned on the record, saying, “I think the first time that ever happened for me was the first time I ever used a big 40-piece orchestra, and that was on Eldorado on the opening tune for that— the ‘Eldorado Overture’—playing those big classic strings”.
“I thought it sounded absolutely marvelous at the time and couldn’t believe it. It was definitely one of those moments.”
And when listening to a lot of their next records, almost every one of them starts off with the same kind of dramatic flair as Eldorado. Sometimes Lynne could knock someone over the head with a hit like ‘Turn to Stone’ on Out of the Blue, but we have ‘Eldorado Overture’ to thank for a song like ‘Tightrope’, which might be one of the most dramatic openings that Lynne ever made with those sad strings coming in.
All it took was him taking the right first step when he was figuring out his sound, and when you look at Eldorado compared to his first few records, something definitely felt different. The world was wide open for them at this point, and when you look at the way that they were operating at the time, things were about to start moving really fast once ‘Can’t Get It Out of My Head’ got on the charts.
